Your Job Is Not To Write Code or Is it?

Because your job is to write code. Your job is to write the best code you can, as quickly as you can, within budget, meeting all of the expected features, in a maintainable way, and a million other things, and still make the users happy. And yes, all of your goals conflict with each other, and you will make mistakes, and you will fail, and you will learn, and you will get better, and you will succeed. Your job is to tell someone when you make a mistake. Your job is to work together with your testers and with operations and with product and finance and, yes, even the other engineers. Your job is to figure out what product will ask for before they ask for it, and build the code so that if and when they do, adding the feature is easy because the code wasn’t written in a way that requires a year-long refactoring project to do it in a way that wouldn’t make Cthulhu literally gleeful at the thought of it.

You’re an engineer, and your job is to design and build software — your job is to engineer things, and to love every second of it.